The Snow Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  “Excuse me, Inspector. I must make my report and return to work. Please authorize me.” There was a hint of desperation in the mechanical inflections. “A man from Number Four has been making seditious remarks about the Hegemony in the Stardock Bar. He is also telling locals that sibyls have access to forbidden knowledge. He appears to be under the influence of drugs.”

  “Yeah, all right, authorization 77A. File an ident on him and we’ll pick him up.” Drugs. Don’t think about drugs. She moved on across the room, concentrating on not looking toward what had been LiouxSked’s private office until a month ago.

  “Excuse me, Inspector!” This time from an apologetic patrolman as he backed into her with an armload of holo files.

  “My fault; I wasn’t watching.” Already the inundation of paperwork that marked the end of their stay on Tiamat was beginning to mount. Merchants and other resident aliens had already begun to worry about the future, or the lack of it; begun to plague the bureaucracy about the hundred different permits and forms and regulations it demanded of them before the final departure. And if she thought they were busy now, just wait another four years ... Yes, busy, busy, have to keep busy; too busy to think about it ...

  But nothing kept her mind clogged with interference loud enough to drown the images of horror and grief for long. She had not lied when she told Andradi that her father didn’t make himself into a drooling vegetable. It made no sense—she knew that man, and whatever he might have been, or done, he was not the kind of man to play with drugs. Hell, he wouldn’t touch a pack of iestas! But there were half a hundred dealers in Carbuncle who could arrange to have an overdose dropped into a cup of tea or a bowl of soup.

  And one person who might want to see it happen—Arienrhod. Jerusha had seen the look on her face at the news of the girl Moon’s kidnapping—the fury and despair. And suddenly she had known why Moon Dawntreader had looked at her from the face of another woman, the face of Winter’s Queen. There was only one way a perfect stranger could be the Queen’s double—and that was if that stranger was the Queen’s clone. Arienrhod had had plans for that girl, plans that must have had something to do with the coming Change, when the off worlders would leave and turn this world over to the Summers again. Their records showed that every past Snow Queen had tried something to keep her power, and Winter’s reign, intact when the Change came. Somehow that girl had fitted into this queen’s plan; she was sure of it. But she had spoiled that plan inadvertently. And Arienrhod was not a woman to let an injury go unpunished. She had taken revenge on the force, on LiouxSked; Jerusha was sure of that, too, just as she was sure that she would never be able to prove it. But she might be able to find out who had done the actual deed ...

  If the Queen didn’t take revenge on her before then. Jerusha swallowed the familiar lump of tension that formed in her throat. She was the one actually to blame; if Arienrhod wanted to punish anyone, it ought to be her. She had barely been able to eat or drink for a week, afraid that the thing that had happened to LiouxSked was waiting to happen to her. And maybe that was part of the punishment: the waiting. Gods, she couldn’t stand it, to end up like that ...

  “Inspector.”

  She flinched with the shock of her return to the real world; blinked the corridor that led to her office, and Gundhalinu’s worried face, into focus. “Oh ... BZ, what are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for you.” He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of her office, back at her, concern spreading on his freckled face. “Inspector, the Commander’s sitting down there in your office—and so is the Chief Justice. I don’t know what the hell they want, but I thought you ought to have some warning.”

  “The Chief Justice?” Her voice echoed incredulously along the walls. “Shit.” She shut her eyes. “It looks like the waiting is over.”

  Gundhalinu raised his eyebrows. “You know what it’s about?”

  “Not exactly.” She shook her head, feeling cold despair settle in the pit of her stomach. The Chief Justice was at the pinnacle of the off world judicial system on Tiamat, the only man who could give orders to the Commander of Police. There was no reason she could possibly imagine for his being in her office ... no good reason. This was Arienrhod’s revenge, then. Was she being dismissed, arrested, deported; charged with corruption, coercion, sex perversion? A thousand nightmares of unjust persecution peopled the silent hallway like a gauntlet of demons, waiting for her to pass. Maybe I should have gotten on that ship this morning after all. “Thanks for the warning, BZ.” Her voice sounded small and faraway.

  “Inspector—” Gundhalinu hesitated, his eyes still asking the question he didn’t have the nerve to ask aloud.

  “Later.” She took a deep breath. “Ask me later, when I know the answer.” She went on down the hall, knowing as she took each step that it was the bravest thing she had ever done.

  She saw them through the clear panel of the door before they noticed her standing outside it. Mantagnes, formerly Chief Inspector and now the Acting Commander, sat tapping on her desk terminal with ill-concealed discomfort; the aging Chief Justice sat in a chair, gaunt with dignity in his tight-collared official robes. She felt her hand slip as she turned the tarnished brass knob on the door.

  Both men rose abruptly as she entered the room. The unexpectedness of it left her staring; she recovered in time to make her salute, a fraction of a second before Mantagnes began his own. “Commander ... Your Honor.” The Chief Justice acknowledged her; they both remained standing. She wondered whether they were waiting for her to sit down first out of some misguided sense of tribunal chivalry. She glanced at the emptiness behind her; if they were, then they must be expecting her to sit on the floor. “Please ... don’t stand on my account.” The gracious tone rang very false in the small space. She didn’t try to match it with a smile.

  Mantagnes moved out from behind her desk, offered her her own seat with a silent gesture. The anger that she read in his eyes made her skin prickle. He was a Kharemoughi, like the Chief Justice—Kharemoughis tended to rise to the top in the foreign service; not surprisingly, since their homeworld dominated it. She knew that on Kharemough women enjoyed relative social equality, since their society valued skill and class status more than sheer physical strength. But the foreign service, which included a wide variety of recruits from less enlightened worlds, seemed to attract the most regressive and autocratic Kharemoughis as well—Mantagnes included. She didn’t know anything about Hovanesse, the Chief Justice, but she could read nothing encouraging in his expression. She went to the desk and sat down, the feel of familiar territory easing her fear a little. She glanced from wall to wall, wished with more than usual feeling that the room had a window.

  They were still standing. “You’re probably wondering why we’re here, Inspector PalaThion,” Hovanesse said, with pitiless banality.

  She fought down a sudden, monstrous urge to laughter. If that isn’t the understatement of the millennium. “Yes, I certainly am, Your Honor.” She folded her hands on the gray-lettered keyboard of her terminal, watched her knuckles whiten as they formed a hopeless prayer gesture. She noticed a battered parcel sitting at the corner of the desk, read her name; considered absently that she did not know the handwriting. Her name was misspelled. I hope it’s a bomb.

  “I understand that—former Commander LiouxSked and his family left Tiamat today. You saw them off?”

  “Yes, Your Honor. They left on schedule.”

  “The gods go with them.” He looked down grimly at the stained, ancient ceramic floor tiles. “How could he do such a thing to his family, and his good name!”

  “Your Honor, I can’t believe—” She felt Mantagnes’s hostile gaze catch her, and faltered. They want to believe it; he wasn’t a Kharemoughi.

  The Chief Justice tugged sharply at his tailored doublet. Jerusha pulled surreptitiously at the collar of her own tunic. It secretly surprised her to see him looking so ill at ease. Kharemoughis were made to wear uniforms; it was the Newhavenese who were mi
serable in the formality of any clothing. “As you know, Inspector, Commander LiouxSked’s ... departure leaves us without an official head of the police force on Tiamat. Naturally, we need to fill the post as soon as possible, for reasons of morale. The responsibility for filling that post belongs to me. But of course it has always been the policy of the Hegemony to allow local rulers some say in the choosing of officials who will work most closely with them.”

  Jerusha leaned back into her chair as Mantagnes’s expression darkened further.

  “The Snow Queen has asked—has demanded—that I appoint you as the new Commander.”

  “Me?” She caught at the desk edge. “Is this ... is this a joke?”

  “A monumental joke,” Mantagnes said sourly. “And we’re the butt of it.”

  “You mean, you’re going along with it? You want me to accept the position?” She could not believe the words when she said them.

  “Of course you’ll accept the position,” Hovanesse said tonelessly. “If this is what she wants from the police force that protects her people, this is what she’ll get,” suggesting that he thought Arienrhod had chosen her own punishment.

  Jerusha pushed slowly up out of her seat, leaned across the desk. “You’re ordering me to become Commander, then. I don’t have any choice.”

  Mantagnes put his hands behind him. “You had no objection to being made an inspector over men who deserved it, to please the Queen.” It was the first time anyone had ever acknowledged it openly. “I’d think you’d jump at the chance to become Commander of Police just because you’re female.”

  “It’s better than never being promoted at all just because I’m female.” She felt pressure growing in her chest, until she thought her heart would stop. “But I don’t want this! Damn it, I don’t like the Queen any better than you do, I don’t want to be Commander—not if it only means being a puppet!” A trap, this is a trap-

  “That isn’t up to you, Commander PalaThion ... unless of course you resign,” Hovanesse said. “But I’ll see that your doubts about your ability to do a satisfactory job as Commander are duly recorded.”

  She said nothing, unable to think of a single appropriate response.

  Mantagnes reached up to his collar, unfastened the insignia he had plainly been expecting to wear forever. He threw them down on her desk; she put out a hand just in time to stop one of them from skidding over the edge. “Congratulations.” He saluted with utter precision.

  She bent her head stiffly. “Dismissed ... Inspector Mantagnes.”

  The two men left the room without a word.

  Jerusha sat down again in her seat. Her hands closed over the winged Commander’s badges, felt them cut into her palms. This was Arienrhod’s doing, Arienrhod’s revenge. Commander PalaThion ... The Queen had hung her up to twist in the wind, thrown a challenge at her that Arienrhod expected would ruin her career.

  But by the Bastard Boatman, she hadn’t gotten to be a Blue by being a weakling or a quitter. So she was Commander PalaThion now—well, damn it, shed make the most of it! She reached up with great deliberateness and pinned the badges to her collar. “If you think you’re going to ruin me, if you think I’m going to fail,” she said aloud to the Queen of the Air, “then that’s your second mistake.” But her hands trembled. I won’t fail! I’m as good as any man! feeling the pain of old, deep wounds that weakened her self-belief.

  She pulled open the drawer in front of her, reaching for the pack of iestas. But the image of LiouxSked’s agony crossed her vision, and her hand closed over itself instead. She shut the drawer. She had not touched the pack of iestas in all the time since his overdose.

  Her glance found the mysterious parcel again; she pulled it across the desk instead, to give her hands and her mind a focus. She untied the twine, unwrapped the rough brown cloth that covered a crude box. It looked like something that had come from the outback on a trader’s ship; and there was no one out there whom she could envision sending a parcel to an inspector of police.

  She opened the box and lifted the contents out carefully: a shell the size of her two open hands, with one of the spiny fingers broken off of its fragile crest. It was the color of sunrise, and its surface had been patiently burnished until it glowed like the dawn sky. She had seen it last, and admired it, on the mantel over the fireplace at Ngenet ran Ahase Miroe’s plantation house ... while she stood listening to the flames crack in the easy silence, sipping the strong black tea Ngenet had urged on her before she went on her way to Carbuncle. That surprisingly peaceful moment came back to her now quite clearly, soothing her. Ironic to think that the only pleasant social visit she could remember since coming to this world ten years ago had been fifteen minutes spent in the company of a man who was probably breaking the law ...

  She probed inside the shell with her fingers, dumped the packing out of the box; but there was no message for her. She sighed—not sure what she had been expecting, only disappointed that it wasn’t there. “Congratulations on your promotion, Geia Jerusha,” she said wearily. She picked up the shell again, closed her eyes; held it against her ear in the way Ngenet had shown her, listening for the voice of the Sea.

  - 18 -

  HEY SPARKS, DON’T LEAVE WHILE YOU’RE HOT. GIVE US A CHANCE TO BREAK EVEN.

  The hologrammic torso above the ravaged city on the game table threw the protest at him as he removed his fragile headset. But he hung it up on the terminal, officially withdrawing.

  “Sorry.” He grinned with nonchalant smugness, making his answer more to the hostile stares of the other players than to the computer controlling the phantom croupier. “It’s getting boring.” He tapped his credit card into the slot, saw it pop out again with the new sum—more money than he had imagined existed in the world a few months ago. The idea that it all belonged to him had almost stopped impressing him now; now that he knew how much wealth circulated along the spiraling Street of Carbuncle. He was even getting a feel for how much money must flow through the Black Gates to the other worlds of the Hegemony ... he was learning fast. But not fast enough.

  He lurched away from the table, drunk on rose-colored Samathan wine, but not so drunk that he couldn’t quit while he was ahead. That was one of the things he was good at, he thought, knowing the odds and his own limits—that was why he was winning more and more often at the games. Arienrhod kept him supplied with money, and he spent the time when he was free of Starbuck’s official persona squandering it in the saloons and gambling halls up and down the Street; ingratiating himself with as many of his fellow pleasure takers as he could stomach. Listening, asking, watching the undercurrents shift: trying to get a feel for where the information came from and flowed to.

  But he was struggling to climb out of a pit of abysmal ignorance, and when the wine and the drugged perfume of too many rooms like this one began to clog his senses, the frustration rose up in him until he ached. There was nothing about the city that gave him any pleasure any more: The things that had delighted a Summer boy might still exist here in the Maze’s vibrant convolutions, but he no longer saw them. The longer he lived in Carbuncle, the more he despised the people who were its life.

  He had begun to hate the sight of everything and everyone, without knowing why; the blackness stained his past and future, and even the sight of his own face. Everything—except Arienrhod. Arienrhod understood the blackness that lay like poisoned pools in the deepest places of his mind; knew how to bleed off his hostility; reassured him that every soul was black at the heart. Arienrhod comforted him, Arienrhod brought him peace, Arienrhod granted his every wish ... Arienrhod loved him. And the fear that he might lose her love, make her regret that she had let him become Starbuck—see her cast him off, as she had cast off his rival—was a cloud always lying on the horizon of that peaceful sea.

  She used her own extensive system of electronic spies and confiding nobles to augment the scraps of information he brought her; but off worlders who really had something to hide had effective countermeasures, and he knew
that she missed the insider’s knowledge of a real Starbuck, a man who had spent his life among them. The day would come when she would begin to resent his Summer ignorance. Maybe, drunk with the moment, he had lost sight of his own limits just once ...

  Sparks pushed his credit card into the lining of his belt, felt his elation sour as he started away from the table. He wondered briefly, resentfully, whether he was really any good at these games; or whether Arienrhod watched him secretly even here and arranged the winning for him.

  He shook the thought off, his hands bunching on his belt; glanced across the scape of turba ned heads, bare heads, caps, helmets, gem woven coiffures, bowed in unholy worship within the flickering panoramas of their chosen games of chance. This was one of the high class hells; more sophisticated, less luridly obvious than the cheaper joints in the lower Maze, which catered to a crowd made up largely of Winter laborers. But even here there was no honest joy. The players laughed and cursed with equal vindictiveness, oblivious to the glaring music that blurred conversation and muted the sounds from the next room. In the next room were the dream machines, where you could lock yourself into terrifying experiences on other worlds, commit any crime, experience anything up to the moment of death that you had the courage to endure. He used them more and more, and they gave him less and less.

  He began to weave his way between the tables toward the entrance, moving with a purpose and assurance that belonged to another man: a man who wore a mask and an off world medallion on his chest. Sparks Dawntreader wore a bright-banded imported tunic and high boots; his hair was cut short like a Winter’s—but it was the unaware arrogance of Starbuck that made the other patrons step out of his way.

  “You look like a man who knows what he wants.” The one who didn’t move aside stepped boldly into his path, the slitted silver of her long gown disguising nothing.